Tesla Cybertruck appears to be facing significant sales challenges. After initial hype faded, and over a million reservations turned out to be as real as unicorns, Tesla is now enabling leasing options and free upgrades to move its inventory of the futuristic pickup truck. The company’s recent silence on the Cybertruck, even omitting it from their earnings call, speaks volumes about the situation.
Tesla initially projected sales of 500,000 Cybertrucks annually and established production capacity at the Giga Texas for 250,000 units per year. After working through the initial reservation backlog with fewer than 40,000 deliveries, the automaker is now struggling to sell the remaining vehicles.
My problem with Tesla is that so many things seem half-unthinking, half-finished or half-assed:
Unthinking: I know! I’ll put a ledge in from of the headlights, so snow can pile up while I’m driving!
Unfinished: all the seam mismatches and eternally unfinished-but-really-close! full self-driving (it ain’t gonna happen).
Half-assed: that recall they had to do because sometimes the latch doesn’t catch properly and the hood flies open when you’re driving and blocks your view. Tesla’s solution isn’t to fix or replace the hood latch so this doesn’t happen; they push a software up that monitors the hood latch and pops up a warning, telling you to pull over and check the hood latch. Because apparently fixing the issue that their poor design (see #1) and bad implementation (see #2) doesn’t warrant an actual fix, they’re just going to fob the risk , the cost and the work off to the customer.
I like the theory that Tesla had a long term roadmap before Elon scooped it up, and that he wasn’t able to do too much to disrupt that in the early years because he was focused on LARPing as Tony Stark on the Internet, and the team that developed around him to insulate the company from him were reasonably good at their jobs. But even the best can only hold back so few bad ideas while keeping up the illusion, and the result has been gradually diminishing amount of ass.
Until that roadmap ran out, and/or Elon stopped being distracted, resulting in them designing and building the Elon.
Promised by next year since 2013